A. Erkiaga wrote:I am not sure whether this pattern may be useful at all, but I had already built it anyway.
...
It is a period-946 Coe ship gun. Instead of using the cheap, neat 8-glider synthesis, it creates a seed pattern and triggers it. Real waste of time, I think...

Well, "useful" is a slightly dangerous word around here. Probably a lot of Lifenthusiasts have a sneaking suspicion that none of the pattern-making that we spend so much time on is really all that useful.

Sure is entertaining, though, and the results are fun to look at. Who knows, maybe someone will wire this into the next stage of the Infinite Conduit, to make a copperhead-to-Coe-ship converter. Sounds pretty near irresistible to me...!

In fact, that gets the repeat time down into the danger zone where it might take extra support guns to push some of the gliders into place in such a tight stream. I've only looked at the SW shotgun so far, but it looks like there's at least one trouble spot where the simplest inserter (HNW31) isn't good enough.

For anyone that wants to try putting a gun together, here's a starter stamp collection of different phases of p148 guns with HNW31 inserter, and one sample Fx119-based inserter which gives six more lanes of clearance (but the bigger spark may cause other difficulties).

Period 148 is too fast for a standard Fx119 inserter -- the extra output glider gets in the way of the next Herschel up to p156, I think. Luckily there's an spare output in the p148 gun, that can just barely be routed around to suppress the extra glider -- see the top left edge shooter above. It's mostly useless, but there are a few dozen glider pairs where it can add a trailing glider, e.g., at a (-5,3) offset, where the NW31 can't (or at least not without an extra glider from somewhere to replace the final block catalyst.)

If anyone wants to try a G-to-B29 converter, it might be worth moving the repeat rate just slightly higher, like 156 or 160. Maybe the same goes for a B29 gun.

Wow, that's an impressive construction, already highly optimized. There's maybe some vague possibility of cutting down the bounding box by a row or column in the SW corner, but even that may be a forlorn hope.

I think everyone should marvel particularly at the double use of the block at (377,306) in LifeViewer -- use Shift+I and look at the coordinates in the lower left corner to find the spot. That's not the kind of optimization trick that one gets to pull off very often. And the weld that allows two syringes to collaborate on the beehive cleanup at (35, 477) is even more ambitious... and there's another sneaky cleanup trick happening at (511,134).

I really like the ridiculously large but useful p74 color-changing reflectors, and obviously the p4 color-preserving bumpers came in useful a lot as well. Very nice work!

Wow, that's an impressive construction, already highly optimized. There's maybe some vague possibility of cutting down the bounding box by a row or column in the SW corner, but even that may be a forlorn hope.

dvgrn wrote:I have some crackpot ideas that might possibly knock off a few more rows and columns in the southwest, but now it's looking like the SE and/or NE corners might be easier targets.

Optimising the SE was relatively straightforward, although I had to pull another stunt involving a block performing double duty as a catalyst. This reduced the row and column count each by 10; this could be further reduced by optimisation in the NE.

Minor modifications and adjustments continue to the fully operational battle station. (Have to keep all those storm troopers busy with something, I suppose.)

The weekender gun will never be small, but it's gradually getting smaller...

Got around to packing the NW and NE shotguns a little tighter, and adding MWSS signals around the edges just for variety. For some geometries MWSSes might help get signals synchronized a little quicker; in this case it turned out that gliders would have been pretty much just as fast, cutting off the corners. This way I had lots of extra space in the corners for timing adjustments, though.

So the G-to-weekender could still be a lot smaller. There are still some embarrassing gaps in the SW and SE shotguns, and it's probably possible to come up with a tighter universal toolkit -- more about that later, in this thread. But at least the pattern scripts are small enough that the Python and Lua versions will both fit in the same post:

The reason I am interested in such a gun is for the construction of the rake below, which could be part of a diagonal lightspeed telegraph. The bounding box for such a telegraph could be much smaller than the current construction, but the recovery time would scale with the length of the diagonal. This could be fixed in theory, but getting the rake gun is the first step.

Sorry for the short, tangential question, but once you've found some salvos to generate an object, how do you determine where the gliders should start to have a second iteration? Do you have to manually figure out where they would be and what phase they are in?

gmc_nxtman wrote:p120 guns can be made much smaller by using Simkin's guns.

I do use 1 Simkin's gun in the middle of the construction (and just learned its name today); however, the path of gliders intersect extensively, so Herschel tracks are mostly needed so insert a glider on its desired track without any collision with other gliders. I agree that some simplification is possible, but the current construction is far from being complete.

Ethanagor wrote:Sorry for the short, tangential question, but once you've found some salvos to generate an object, how do you determine where the gliders should start to have a second iteration? Do you have to manually figure out where they would be and what phase they are in?

I assume you are not talking about the lightspeed telegraph construction, since I have only know it could work in principle and that I do not know what its period would be yet. If I understand the question, the answer is that I arbitrarily choose the period to be 480, because it a multiple of 120 and hence is compatible with the gospel and Simkin gun, which are small components that can be used to synthesize other rakes with ease. Given the glider recipe I found for 30P5H2V0, it could be possible to have a faster gun with period +-430; however, below a certain threshold for the period, the gliders will either collide with the produced spaceship or fail to do their intended reaction.

The gun is incomplete thought, it could be that some gliders cannot be inserted using a Herschel track mechanism, so that the phase of gliders would need to be changed. If you look for this spaceship on the wiki, you can download its glider construction (which I included below). There are many steps that requires glider to be synchronized, but the delays of arbitrary sizes can be inserted if needed.

Ethanagor wrote:Sorry for the short, tangential question, but once you've found some salvos to generate an object, how do you determine where the gliders should start to have a second iteration? Do you have to manually figure out where they would be and what phase they are in?

I'll try a quick answer as I understand the question. A script could be written to find the safe repeat time. EDIT: Here's a script by chris_c that does that, intended for building continuous syntheses from incremental ones.

But if you're figuring out second-iteration spacing by hand, it's pretty quick in Golly with a little practice. Here's one way:

1) Paste a continuous synthesis into an empty universe.
2) Select each of the four-or-whatever component salvos, and use shift.py/shift.lua to move them far enough back so that you know it's safe -- "-500 -500", "-500 500", "500 -500" and "500 500", if necessary.
3) Paste another copy of the continuous synthesis in the same location as the original.
4) Save a copy of the pattern in case anything goes wrong. Then select the central synthesis.
5) Run the pattern and see if you get two copies of your target pattern.
6) If so, type Shift+Space some number of times to move the outside gliders closer without moving the inside gliders. Then go back to step 5 and try the recipe again.
7) If the two syntheses interfere with each other, hit Ctrl+Z some number of times to back off the outside gliders. Then go back to step 5.

You can do steps 6 and 7 as a rough binary search, so it won't take many cycles to determine what the closest spacing is that still works.

Then make sure Golly's generation count is 0, and run the pattern until a glider in one of the second salvos exactly matches the original location of that glider's counterpart in the first salvo. The number of ticks that that takes is the repeat time of the recipe.

Ethanagor wrote:Sorry for the short, tangential question, but once you've found some salvos to generate an object, how do you determine where the gliders should start to have a second iteration? Do you have to manually figure out where they would be and what phase they are in?

dvgrn wrote:
I'll try a quick answer as I understand the question. ...

That's basically how I combine multiple steps to create a single continuous recipe. I have one extra detail to add, however. Once one finds the tightest possible fit, it's often useful to observe just why one tick closer doesn't work. In some cases, a dying spark interferes with an incoming glider in a way that it wouldn't, if the glider were even further advanced (e.g. it produces a domino spark that interferes with the point of a glider, but would harmlessly induct a 2-bit edge of one). This is even more likely to happen with the sides of *WSS, as the spaceship might just happen to be facing away from the incoming spark. In such cases, it might be possible to squeeze one or two extra ticks out of the spacing. Also, if a step produces an annoying long-lasting debris plume, it is sometimes possible to add one or more additional gliders to make it smaller or faster, trading speed for complexity.

It will take a lot of memory to run well. My old laptop took fifteen or twenty minutes to fill the Herschel loop and start sending out Corderships. A faster system seems to handle it reasonably okay, though not running away or anything, at step sizes around 2^12 to 2^15 with a couple of gigabytes of RAM available.

Christopher Marlowe almost wrote:Is this the recipe that launched a thousand (Corder)ships?

[quote="even though he said "hundred", people say Mao Zedong almost"]Let a thousand Corderships bloom.[/quote]
It might help to replace the Fx77 chains with some series of conduits that has an exact power-of-two spatial and temporal offset, if anyone wants to try that -- move the elbow block 23fd at the end to get it back to the starting point, and maybe cut down on the number of output Corderships a little. Then the same sets of hashtiles could be re-used many times, following the recipe around the loop.

The recipe itself could be made smaller, especially by saving a hand object instead of re-creating it with the elbow-to-hand recipe every time. I'm not sure it can be made small enough to fit into the next lower power of two, though, unless slmake can be made more efficient somehow.

The construction arm elbows move 23fd farther away every cycle, so you see gradually widening parallelograms of recipe gliders.